28 February 2017

Gakken Publishers are celebrating their 70th anniversary
this year.Since the company’s establishment in 1947, Gakken has
become well known for its educational books and other educational materials.In the run-up to their anniversary last year,
Gakken began uploading their back catalogue of educational stop motion
animation biweekly onto their YouTube
Channel.This is an overview of the
first ten films, which were released between 1958 and 1960.

The first film is an adaptation of a well-known story by popular late Taishō
/ early Shōwa
writer Kenji
Miyazawa.“The
Restaurant of Many Orders” has a
particularly important place in Japanese animation history because the story
served as the inspiration for animation pioneer Tadanari Okamoto’s final
film, which was completed posthumously by his friend, Kihachirō
Kawamoto.

The other short films are adaptations of folk and fairy tales from
Japan and Europe.Some are adapted in a
traditional fashion, while others are modern interpretations.In addition to puppets, cutouts and some
experimental techniques are used.

The two most prominent stop motion animators to establish themselves in
Gakken’s animation department were Jinbo Matsue (神保まつえ, b. 1928) and Kazuhiko Watanabe (渡辺和彦, 19??-1997).Matsue joined Gakken in 1953 after graduating
from college in Yokohama with a degree in education.After initially working on picture books for
children, she moved into filmmaking. Watanabe became interested in puppet animation
after meeting the legendary Czech animator Jiří Trnka
while a student of Western painting at Tokyo University of the Arts.

Gakken’s films were distributed to
schools and libraries in Japan and in the United States (via Coronet Films)
initially on 16mm, moving to video in the 1980s.This is the first time the films have been distributed
in digital format.Links to the films
and to reviews of the films are below.They are currently only available in Japanese, but I hope the summaries
that I have been writing with the reviews will aid non-Japanese speakers in
following the storylines.

24 February 2017

The National Film Center in Tokyo
is celebrating the centenary of Japanese animation this year.While the exact date that the first animation
was made in Japan is uncertain as many people were experimenting privately with
cinematic technology in the early years, 1917 is the year that the first
commercially produced Japanese animated films were publicly screened.This included short works by Ōten SHIMOKAWA (下川凹天, 1892-1973), Seitarō
KITAYAMA (北山清太郎,
1888-1945), and Jun’ichi KŌUCHI (幸内純一, 1886-1970).

Thanks to
funding from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs
as part of the National Project for the Sustainability of Born-Digital Cinema,
the NFC has selected 64 works released between 1917 and 1941 and made them available
for screening online complete with fresh subtitles by Dean Shimauchi (Rosemary Dean and Tetsuro
Shimauchi). Other subtitling was done by Masa Yoshikawa (Burglars of Baghdad Castle, Nonsense Story) and Ayako Kawakita and Tim Olive (The Nation of Fish, A Wolf is a Wolf, Rascal Raccoon). and Many of these works have
never before been available on DVD with English subtitles, let alone in a
digital online format. Several films, particularly the abstract works of Shigeji Ogino, have no titles.

The most
exciting of these are the two earliest extant anime The Dull Sword (Namakura Gatana, 1917) and Urashima Tarō
(1918) – films which were considered
lost until copies were miraculously discovered in an antique shop in Osaka in
2008.As the vast majority of pre-war
films have been lost due to natural disaster, war, and general neglect, each of
these 64 films is an important glimpse into early anime history and early 20th
century Japanese culture.They represent
a wide variety of genres including slapstick comedy, record talkies,
documentary, propaganda, and experimental.

As these
films were made for the domestic market, they do not have official international
titles.Several titles have been
translated in various ways over the years.I have left the English titles as posted by the NFC.On the Japanese Animation
Filmography Project, I list alternate titles.Some of the animations are of completely unknown
origin as the films do not have credits.Very little is known about the animator Hakusan Kimura apart from his films.

The website information
is currently mainly in Japanese only, but the NFC assures us that they are
working on an English version that they hope will be available sometime in the
next two months.In the meantime, to
help you negotiate the website, I have created links to the profiles of
animators and a chronological list of the 64 films.This is by no means all of the extant pre-war
Japanese animation works, but it is a tremendous start and I hope that the NFC
will be able to extend this project in the coming years.